


The Redundancy of Monica Reyes (X-Files, "Lord of the Flies")

by PlaidAdder



Series: X-Files Meta [26]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Season 9, lord of the flies - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-06
Updated: 2014-09-06
Packaged: 2018-02-16 08:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2263533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mulder and Doggett are different enough and their strengths are complementary enough that could make an effective and entertaining team (in “Vienen,” for instance). “Lord of the Flies” more or less proves that if you have Scully on the case, you really don’t need Reyes. There’s nothing that Reyes can do that Scully can’t; and there’s a lot that Scully can do that Reyes can’t.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Redundancy of Monica Reyes (X-Files, "Lord of the Flies")

 

 

This right here tells you why Season 9 was never going to work.

"Lord of the Flies" was never going to be a great episode, but it is not utterly devoid of interest. It offers some mild entertainment via Dr. Rocky Bronzino, a kind of male version of Dr. Bambi from "War of the Coprophages," who keeps trying to flirt with Scully and being shot down really rather deliciously. (This is, alas, marred by Scully’s trying to shoot him down by saying, "I’m a mother." You know, I’ll believe that the guys who write this show think that being a mother puts you outside the Hot Zone, but not that Scully would either agree with them, or stoop to pretending to agree with them just to get Rocky to back off.) And of course there’s the bonus surprise visit from Jane Lynch as, of all things, a high school principal who also turns out to be a human/bug hybrid.

Anyway. My point is: In “Lord of the Flies,” Monica Reyes is basically a spare part. She has no real role to play, apart from letting Doggett bounce dialogue off her. And this is a function of the fact that unless we’re dealing with a Satanic murder that triggers Reyes’s spidey-senses, Reyes really brings nothing special to the table. Scully, who as she keeps informing us is “a medical doctor,” was always useful, whether it was conducting the autopsy or interpreting the data or remembering some kind of key fact about human biology that Mulder never knew. “Lord of the Flies” emphasizes how very much NOT like that Reyes in the first post-credits scene. The local medical examiner doesn’t want to get involved with speculating about the cause of death because of pending lawsuits. He brings them in to look at the body and they just stare at it. Doggett doesn’t know what to do with it. Reyes doesn’t know what to do with it. They see something moving under one of the corpse’s eyelids. Someone’s got to see what that’s about. Reyes picks up the tweezers…and a few seconds later, Scully arrives to take over something she shouldn’t ever have meddled with.

Mulder and Doggett are different enough and their strengths are complementary enough that could make an effective and entertaining team (in “Vienen,” for instance). “Lord of the Flies” more or less proves that if you have Scully on the case, you really don’t need Reyes. There’s nothing that Reyes can do that Scully can’t; and there’s a lot that Scully can do that Reyes can’t. I know the Season 9 conceit is that Scully has mommy-tracked herself into a teaching job and so can’t be counted on to go running around after hours with flashlights any more—except that in “Lord of the Flies” she does. 

(When I get to the end of Season 9 there’s going to be a ginormous meta about Scully’s maternal nightmare. But that’s another story for another time.)

Anyway. I suppose the hope was that Scully would eventually follow Mulder into oblivion but that Reyes and Doggett could have gone on for a 10th season carrying the show on their own. It was never going to happen. One thing “Lord of the Flies” also demonstrates is that Gillian Anderson is just a much better actress than Annabeth Gish. The episode doesn’t call for a lot of complicated emotion work; but you see it anyway. GA has better comic timing, she’s very precise about the effects she creates with her delivery, when she’s on screen you pay attention to her, whereas Gish can’t even really carry off her opening banter with Doggett. 

And then GA does the final voiceover, even though it wasn’t Scully’s case. Why? Because you’d have to be crazy to give it to Gish, who can’t even get an interesting level of inflection into her actual face-to-face dialogue. 

It’s maybe not fair to compare them; GA’s had 8+ years to develop this character and Gish is brand new. But that’s why it was kind of stupid for the show to force us to compare them. And that’s why Season 9 was doomed from the beginning.

Well, one of the reasons.


End file.
